No More Learning

DNA viruses and computer viruses spread for the same reason: an environment exists in which there is machinery well set up to duplicate and spread them around and to obey the instructions that the viruses embody. These two environments are, respectively, the environment of cellular physiology and the environment provided by a large community of computers and data-handling machinery. Are there any other environments like these, any other humming paradises of replication?
The Infected Mind
I have already alluded to the programmed-in gullibility of a child, so useful for learning language and traditional wisdom, and so easily subverted by nuns, Moonies and their ilk. More generally, we all exchange information with one another. We don't exactly plug floppy disks into slots in one another's skulls, but we exchange sentences, both through our ears and through our eyes. We notice each other's styles of moving and of dressing, and are influenced. We take in advertising jingles, and are presumably persuaded by them, otherwise hard-headed businessmen would not spend so much money polluting the air with them.
Think about the two qualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of a friendly medium: the two qualities that make cellular machinery so friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These qualities are, first, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently reproduced accurately; and, second, a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated. Cellular machinery and electronic computers excel in both these virus- friendly qualities. How do human brains match up? As faithful
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duplicators they are certainly less perfect than either cells or electronic computers. Nevertheless, they are still pretty good, perhaps about as faithful as an RNA virus, though not as good as DNA with all its elaborate proofreading measures against textual degradation. Evidence of the fidelity of brains, especially child brains, as data duplicators, is provided by language itself. Bernard Shaw's Professor Higgins was able by ear alone to place Londoners in the street where they grew up. Fiction is not evidence for anything, but everyone knows that Higgins's fictional skill is only an exaggeration of something we can all do. Any American can tell Deep South from Mid West, New England from Hillbilly. Any New Yorker can tell Bronx from Brooklyn. Equivalent claims could be substantiated for any country. What this phenomenon means is that human brains are capable of pretty accurate copying (otherwise the accents of, say, Newcastle would not be stable enough to be recognized) but with some mistakes (otherwise pronunciation would not evolve, and all speakers of a language would inherit identically the same accents from their remote ancestors). Language evolves, because it has both the great stability and the slight changeability that are prerequisites for any evolving system.
The second requirement of a virus-friendly environment - that it should obey a program of coded instructions - is again only quantitatively less true for brains than for cells or computers. We sometimes obey orders from one another, but also we sometimes don't. Nevertheless, it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions. Instructions to genuflect, to bow towards Mecca, to nod one's head rhythmically towards the wall, to shake like a maniac, to 'speak in tongues' - the list of such arbitrary and pointless motor patterns offered by religion alone is extensive - are obeyed, if not slavishly, at least with some reasonably high statistical probability.
Less portentously, and again especially prominent in children, the 'craze' is a striking example of behaviour that owes more to epi- demiology than to rational choice. Yoyos, hula hoops and pogo sticks, with their associated behavioural fixed actions, sweep through schools, and more sporadically leap from school to school, in patterns that differ from a measles epidemic in no serious particular. Ten years ago, you could have travelled thousands of miles through the United States and never seen a baseball cap turned back to front. Today the reverse base- ball cap is ubiquitous. I do not know what the pattern of geographic spread of the reverse baseball cap precisely was, but epidemiology is certainly among the professions primarily qualified to study it. We
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? don't have to get into arguments about 'determinism'; we don't have to claim that children are compelled to imitate their fellows' hat fashions. It is enough that their hat-wearing behaviour, as a matter of fact, is statistically affected by the hat-wearing behaviour of their fellows.
Trivial though they are, crazes provide us with yet more circum- stantial evidence that human minds, especially perhaps juvenile ones, have the qualities that we have singled out as desirable for an informa- tional parasite. At the very least the mind is a plausible candidate for infection by something like a computer virus, even if it is not quite such a parasite's dream-environment as a cell nucleus or an electronic computer. It is intriguing to wonder what it might feel like, from the inside, if one's mind were the victim of a 'virus'. This might be a deliberately designed parasite, like a present-day computer virus. Or it might be an inadvertently mutated and unconsciously evolved parasite. Either way, especially if the evolved parasite was the memetic descendant of a long line of successful ancestors, we are entitled to expect the typical 'mind virus' to be pretty good at its job of getting itself successfully replicated.
Progressive evolution of more effective mind-parasites will have two aspects. New 'mutants' (either random or designed by humans) that are better at spreading will become more numerous. And there will be a ganging up of ideas that flourish in one another's presence, ideas that mutually support one another just as genes do and, as I have speculated, computer viruses may one day do. We expect that replicators will go around together from brain to brain in mutually compatible gangs. These gangs will come to constitute a package, which may be sufficiently stable to deserve a collective name such as Roman Catholicism or Voodoo. It doesn't too much matter whether we analogize the whole package to a single virus, or each one of the component parts to a single virus. The analogy is not that precise anyway, just as the distinction between a computer virus and a computer worm is nothing to get worked up about. What matters is that minds are friendly environ- ments to parasitic, self-replicating ideas or information, and that minds are typically massively infected.
Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it. Accepting that a virus might be difficult to detect in your own mind, what tell-tale signs might you look out for? I shall answer by imagining how a medical textbook might describe the typical symptoms of a sufferer (arbitrarily assumed to be male).
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1. The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as 'faith'.
2. Patients typically make a positive virtue of faith's being strong and unshakeable, in spite of not being based upon evidence. Indeed, they may feel that the less evidence there is, the more virtuous the belief (see below). This paradoxical idea that lack of evidence is a positive virtue where faith is concerned has something of the quality of a program that is self-sustaining, because it is self-referential. * Once the proposition is believed, it automatically undermines opposition to itself. The 'lack of evidence is a virtue' idea would be an admirable sidekick, ganging up with faith itself in a clique of mutually supportive viral programs.
3. A related symptom, which a faith-sufferer may also present, is the conviction that 'mystery', per se, is a good thing. It is not a virtue to solve mysteries. Rather we should enjoy them, even revel in their insolubility.
Any impulse to solve mysteries could be seriously inimical to the spread of a mind virus. It would not, therefore, be surprising if the idea that 'mysteries are better not solved' was a favoured member of a mutually supporting gang of viruses. Take the 'Mystery of the Transubstantiation'. It is easy and non-mysterious to believe that in some symbolic or metaphorical sense the eucharistic wine turns into the blood of Christ. The Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, however, claims far more. The 'whole substance' of the wine is converted into the blood of Christ; the appearance of wine that remains is 'merely accidental', 'inhering in no substance'. Transubstantiation is colloquially taught as meaning that the wine 'literally' turns into the blood of Christ. Whether in its obfuscatory Aristotelian or its franker colloquial form, the claim of transubstantiation can be made only if we do serious violence to the normal meanings of words like 'substance' and 'literally'. Redefining words is not a sin but, if we use words like 'whole substance' and 'literally' for this case, what word are we going to use when we really and truly want to say that something did actually happen? As Anthony Kenny observed of his own puzzlement as a young seminarian, 'For all I could tell, my typewriter might be Benjamin Disraeli transubstantiated . . . '
*This is among many related ideas that have been grown in the endlessly fertile mind of Douglas Hofstadter (Metamagical Themas, London, Penguin, 1985).
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? Roman Catholics, whose belief in infallible authority compels them to accept that wine becomes physically transformed into blood despite all appearances, refer to the 'Mystery' of the transubstantiation. Calling it a Mystery makes everything OK, you see. At least, it works for a mind well prepared by background infection. Exactly the same trick is performed in the 'Mystery' of the Trinity. Mysteries are not meant to be solved, they are meant to strike awe. The 'mystery is a virtue' idea comes to the aid of the Catholic, who would otherwise find intolerable the obligation to believe the obvious nonsense of the transubstantiation and the 'three- in-one'. Again, the belief that 'mystery is a virtue' has a self-referential ring. As Douglas Hofstadter might put it, the very mysteriousness of the belief moves the believer to perpetuate the mystery.
An extreme symptom of 'mystery is a virtue' infection is Tertullian's 'Certum est quia impossibile est' (It is certain because it is impossible). That way madness lies. One is tempted to quote Lewis Carroll's White Queen, who, in response to Alice's 'One can't believe impossible things', retorted, 'I daresay you haven't had much practice . . . When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. ' Or Douglas Adams's Electric Monk, a labour-saving device programmed to do your believing for you, which was capable of 'believing things they'd have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City' and which, at the moment of being introduced to the reader, believed, contrary to all the evidence, that everything in the world was a uniform shade of pink. But White Queens and Electric Monks become less funny when you realize that these virtuoso believers are indistinguishable from revered theologians in real life. 'It is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd' (Tertullian again). Sir Thomas Browne quotes Tertullian with approval, and goes further: 'Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith. ' And 'I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point; for to credit ordinary and visible objects is not faith,
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but perswasion. ' 1 have the feeling that something more interesting is
going on here than just plain insanity or surrealist nonsense, something akin to the admiration we feel when we watch a juggler on a tightrope. It is as though the faithful gain prestige through managing to believe even more ridiculous things than their rivals succeed in believing. Are these people testing - exercising - their believing muscles, training themselves to believe impossible things so that they can take in their stride the merely improbable things that they are ordinarily called upon to believe?
While I was writing this, The Guardian (29 July 1991) fortuitously 139
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carried a beautiful example. It came in an interview with a rabbi under- taking the bizarre task of vetting the kosher-purity of food products right back to the ultimate origins of their minutest ingredients. He was currently agonizing over whether to go all the way to China to scrutinize the menthol that goes into cough sweets.
Have you ever tried checking Chinese menthol . . . it was extremely difficult, especially since the first letter we sent received the reply in best Chinese English, The product contains no kosher' . . . China has only recently started opening up to kosher investigators. The menthol should be OK, but you can never be absolutely sure unless you visit.
These kosher investigators run a telephone hotline on which up-to-the- minute red-alerts of suspicion are recorded against chocolate bars or cod-liver oil. The rabbi sighs that the green-inspired trend away from artificial colours and flavours 'makes life miserable in the kosher field because you have to follow all these things back'. When the interviewer asks him why he bothers with this obviously pointless exercise, he makes it very clear that the point is precisely that there is no point:
That most of the Kashrut laws are divine ordinances without reason given is 100 per cent the point. It is very easy not to murder people. Very easy. It is a little bit harder not to steal because one is tempted occasionally. So that is no great proof that I believe in God or am fulfilling His will. But, if He tells me not to have a cup of coffee with milk in it with my mincemeat and peas at lunchtime, that is a test. The only reason I am doing that is because I have been told to so do. It is doing something difficult.
Helena Cronin has suggested to me that there may be an analogy here
to Amotz Zahavi's handicap theory of sexual selection and the evolution
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of signals. Long unfashionable, even ridiculed, Zahavi's theory has
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recently been cleverly rehabilitated by Alan Grafen and is now taken
seriously by evolutionary biologists. Zahavi suggests that peacocks, for instance, evolve their absurdly burdensome fans with their ridiculously conspicuous (to predators) colours, precisely because they are burden- some and dangerous, and therefore impressive to females. The peacock is, in effect, saying: 'Look how fit and strong I must be, since I can afford to carry around this preposterous tail. '
To avoid misunderstanding of the subjective language in which Zahavi likes to make his points, I should add that the biologist's convention of personifying the unconscious actions of natural selection is taken for granted here. Grafen has translated the argument into an orthodox Darwinian mathematical model, and it works. No claim is
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? here being made about the intentionality or awareness of peacocks and peahens. They can be as automatic or as intentional as you please. Moreover, Zahavi's theory is general enough not to depend upon a Darwinian underpinning. A flower advertising its nectar to a 'sceptical' bee could benefit from the Zahavi principle. But so could a human salesman seeking to impress a client.
The premise of Zahavi's idea is that natural selection will favour scepticism among females (or among recipients of advertising messages generally). The only way for a male (or any advertiser) to authenticate his boast of strength (quality, or whatever it is) is to prove that it is true by shouldering a truly costly handicap - a handicap that only a genuinely strong (high-quality, etc. ) male could bear. It may be called the principle of costly authentication. And now to the point. Is it possible that some religious doctrines are favoured not in spite of being ridiculous but precisely because they are ridiculous? Any wimp in religion could believe that bread symbolically represents the body of Christ, but it takes a real, red-blooded Catholic to believe something as daft as the transub- stantiation. If you can believe that you can believe anything, and (witness the story of Doubting Thomas) these people are trained to see that as a virtue.
Let us return to our list of symptoms that someone afflicted with the mental virus of faith, and its accompanying gang of secondary infections, may expect to experience.
4. The sufferer may find himself behaving intolerantly towards vectors of rival faiths, in extreme cases even killing them or advocating their deaths. He may be similarly violent in his disposition towards apostates (people who once held the faith but have renounced it); or towards heretics (people who espouse a different - often, perhaps significantly, only very slightly different - version of the faith). He may also feel hostile towards other modes of thought that are potentially inimical to his faith, such as the method of scientific reason which could function rather like a piece of antiviral software.
The threat to kill the distinguished novelist Salman Rushdie is only the latest in a long line of sad examples. On the very day that I wrote this, the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses was found murdered, a week after a near-fatal attack on the Italian translator of the same book. By the way, the apparently opposite symptom of 'sympathy' for Muslim 'hurt', voiced by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other Christian leaders (verging, in the case of the Vatican, on outright criminal
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complicity) is, of course, a manifestation of the symptom we diagnosed earlier: the delusion that faith, however obnoxious its results, has to be respected simply because it is faith.
Murder is an extreme, of course. But there is an even more extreme symptom, and that is suicide in the militant service of a faith. Like a soldier ant programmed to sacrifice her life for germ-line copies of the genes that did the programming, a young Arab is taught that to die in a holy war is the quickest way to heaven. Whether the leaders who exploit him really believe this does not diminish the brutal power that the 'suicide mission virus' wields on behalf of the faith. Of course suicide, like murder, is a mixed blessing: would-be converts may be repelled by, or may treat with contempt, a faith that is insecure enough to need such tactics.
More obviously, if too many individuals sacrifice themselves the supply of believers could run low. This was true of a notorious example of faith- inspired suicide, though in this case it was not 'kamikazi' death in battle. The Peoples' Temple sect went extinct when its leader, the Reverend Jim Jones, led the bulk of his followers from the United States to the Promised Land of 'Jonestown' in the Guyanan jungle, where he persuaded more than 900 of them, childrenfirst,to drink cyanide. The macabre affair was fully investigated by a team from the San Francisco Chronicle.
Jones, 'the Father', had called his flock together and told them it was time to depart for heaven.
'We're going to meet,' he promised, 'in another place. '
The words kept coming over the camp's loudspeakers.
83 'There is great dignity in dying. It is a great demonstration for everyone to die. '
Incidentally, it does not escape the trained mind of the alert socio- biologist that Jones, within his sect in earlier days, 'proclaimed himself the only person permitted to have sex' (presumably his partners were also permitted). A secretary would arrange for Jones's liaisons. She would call up and say, 'Father hates to do this, but he has this tremendous urge and could you please . . . ? ' His victims were not only female. One 17- year-old male follower, from the days when Jones's community was still in San Francisco, told how he was taken for dirty weekends to a hotel where Jones received a 'minister's discount for Rev. Jim Jones and son'. The same boy said:
I was really in awe of him. He was more than a father. I would have killed my parents for him.
What is remarkable about the Reverend Jim Jones is not his own self- serving behaviour but the almost superhuman gullibility of his followers.
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? Given such prodigious credulity, can anyone doubt that human minds are ripe for malignant infection?
Admittedly, the Reverend Jones conned only a few thousand people. But his case is an extreme, the tip of an iceberg. The same eagerness to be conned by religious leaders is widespread. Most of us would have been prepared to bet that nobody could get away with going on television and saying, in all but so many words, 'Send me your money, so that I can use it to persuade other suckers to send me their money too. ' Yet today, in every major conurbation in the United States, you can find at least one television evangelist channel entirely devoted to this transparent confidence trick. And they get away with it in sackfuls. Faced with suckerdom on this awesome scale, it is hard not to feel a grudging sympathy with the shiny-suited conmen. Until you realize that not all the suckers are rich, and that it is often widows' mites on which the evangelists are growing fat. I have even heard one of them explicitly invoking the principle that I now identify with Zahavi's principle of costly authentication. God really appreciates a donation, he said with passionate sincerity, only when that donation is so large that it hurts. Elderly paupers were wheeled on to testify how much happier they felt since they had made over their little all to the Reverend whoever it was.
5. The patient may notice that the particular convictions that he holds, while having nothing to do with evidence, do seem to owe a great deal to epidemiology. Why, he may wonder, do I hold this set of convic- tions rather than that set? Is it because I surveyed all the world's faiths and chose the one whose claims seemed most convincing? Almost certainly not.
If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different and largely contradictory set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place. Epidemiology, not evidence.
6. If the patient is one of the rare exceptions who follows a different religion from his parents, the explanation may still be epidemi- ological. To be sure, it is possible that he dispassionately surveyed the world's faiths and chose the most convincing one. But it is statistically more probable that he has been exposed to a parti- cularly potent infective agent - a John Wesley, a Jim Jones or a St Paul. Here we are talking about horizontal transmission, as in
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measles. Before, the epidemiology was that of vertical transmission
as in Huntington's Chorea.
7. The internal sensations of the patient may be startlingly reminiscent
of those more ordinarily associated with sexual love. This is an extremely potent force in the brain, and it is not surprising that some viruses have evolved to exploit it. St Teresa of Avila's famously orgasmic vision is too notorious to need quoting again. More seriously, and on a less crudely sensual plane, the philosopher Anthony Kenny provides moving testimony to the pure delight that awaits those that manage to believe in the mystery of the transubstantiation. After describing his ordination as a Roman Catholic priest, empowered by laying on of hands to celebrate Mass, he vividly recalls
. . . the exaltation of the first months during which I had the power to say Mass. Normally a slow and sluggish riser, I would leap early out of bed, fully awake and full of excitement at the thought of the momentous act I was privileged to perform. I rarely said the public Community Mass: most days I celebrated alone at a side altar with a junior member of the College to serve as acolyte and congregation. But that made no difference to the solemnity of the sacrifice or the validity of the consecration.
It was touching the body of Christ, the closeness of the priest to Jesus, which most enthralled me. I would gaze on the Host after the words of consecration, soft-eyed like a lover looking into the eyes of his beloved . . . Those early days as a priest remain in my memory as days of fulfilment and tremulous happiness; something precious, and yet too fragile to last, like a romantic love-affair
84 brought up short by the reality of an ill-assorted marriage.
Dr Kenny is affectingly believable that it felt to him, as a young priest, as though he was in love with the consecrated host. What a brilliantly successful virus! On the same page, incidentally, Kenny also shows us that the virus is transmitted contagiously - if not literally, then at least in some sense - from the palm of the infecting bishop's hand through the top of the new priest's head:
If Catholic doctrine is true, every priest validly ordained derives his orders in an unbroken line of laying on of hands, through the bishop who ordains him, back to one of the twelve Apostles . . . there must be centuries-long, recorded chains of layings on of hands. It surprises me that priests never seem to trouble to trace their spiritual ancestry in this way, finding out who ordained their bishop, and who ordained him, and so on to Julius II or Celestine V or Hildebrand, or Gregory the Great, perhaps.
It surprises me, too.
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? Is Science a Virus?
No. Not unless all computer programs are viruses. Good, useful programs spread because people evaluate them, recommend them and pass them on. Computer viruses spread solely because they embody the coded instructions: 'Spread me. ' Scientific ideas, like all memes, are subject to a kind of natural selection, and this might look superficially virus-like. But the selective forces that scrutinize scientific ideas are not arbitrary or capricious. They are exacting, well-honed rules, and they do not favour pointless self-serving behaviour. They favour all the virtues laid out in textbooks of standard methodology: testability, evidential support, precision, quantifiability, consistency, intersubjectivity, repeatability, universality, progressiveness, independence of cultural milieu, and so on. Faith spreads despite a total lack of every single one of these virtues.
You may find elements of epidemiology in the spread of scientific ideas, but it will be largely descriptive epidemiology. The rapid spread of a good idea through the scientific community may even look like a description of a measles epidemic. But when you examine the underlying reasons you find that they are good ones, satisfying the demanding standards of scientific method. In the history of the spread of faith you will find little else but epidemiology, and causal epidemiology at that. The reason why person A believes one thing and B believes another is simply and solely that A was born on one continent and B on another. Testability, evidential support and the rest aren't even remotely considered. For scientific belief, epidemiology merely comes along afterwards and describes the history of its acceptance. For religious belief, epidemiology is the root cause.
Epilogue
Happily, viruses don't win every time. Many children emerge unscathed from the worst that nuns and mullahs can throw at them. Anthony Kenny's own story has a happy ending. He eventually renounced his orders because he could no longer tolerate the obvious contradictions within Catholic belief, and he is now a highly respected scholar. But one cannot help remarking that it must be a powerful infection indeed that took a man of his wisdom and intelligence - now President of the British Academy, no less - three decades to fight off. Am I unduly alarmist to fear for the soul of my six-year-old innocent?
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The Great Convergence
Are science and religion converging? No. There are modern scientists whose words sound religious but whose beliefs, on close examination, turn out to be identical to those of other scientists who straight-
forwardly call themselves atheists. Ursula Goodenough's lyrical book,
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The Sacred Depths of Nature, is sold as a religious book, is endorsed by
theologians on the back cover, and its chapters are liberally laced with prayers and devotional meditations. Yet, by the book's own account, Dr Goodenough does not believe in any sort of supreme being, does not believe in any sort of life after death; on any normal understanding of the English language, she is no more religious than I am. She shares with other atheist scientists a feeling of awe at the majesty of the universe and the intricate complexity of life. Indeed, the jacket copy for her book - the message that science does not 'point to an existence that is bleak, devoid of meaning, pointless . . . ' but on the contrary 'can be a wellspring
of solace and hope' - would have been equally suitable for my own
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Unweaving the Rainbow, or Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot If that is religion,
then I am a deeply religious man. But it isn't. As far as I can tell, my 'atheistic' views are identical to Ursula Goodenough's 'religious' ones. One of us is misusing the English language, and I don't think it's me.
She happens to be a biologist but this kind of neo-deistic pseudo- religion is more often associated with physicists. In Stephen Hawking's case, I hasten to insist, the accusation is unjust. His much quoted phrase 'The Mind of God' no more indicates belief in God than does my 'God knows! ' (as a way of saying that I don't). I suspect the same of Einstein's picturesque invoking of the 'Dear Lord' to personify the laws of physics*. Paul Davies, however, adopted Hawking's phrase as the title of a book which went on to earn the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, the
? Indeed, Einstein himself was indignant at the suggestion: 'It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the
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? most lucrative prize in the world today, prestigious enough to be presented in Westminster Abbey by royalty. Daniel Dennett once remarked to me in Faustian vein: 'Richard, if ever you fall on hard times . . . '
The latter day deists have moved on from their eighteenth-century counterparts who, for all that they eschewed revelation and espoused no particular denomination, still believed in some sort of supreme intelligence. If you count Einstein and Hawking as religious, if you allow the cosmic awe of Ursula Goodenough, Paul Davies, Carl Sagan and me as true religion, then religion and science have indeed con- verged, especially when you factor in such atheist priests as Don Cupitt and many university chaplains. But if 'religion' is allowed such a flabbily elastic definition, what word is left for real religion, religion as the ordinary person in the pew or on the prayer-mat understands it today; religion, indeed, as any intellectual would have understood it in previous centuries, when intellectuals were religious like everybody else? If God is a synonym for the deepest principles of physics, what word is left for a hypothetical being who answers prayers; intervenes to save cancer patients or help evolution over difficult jumps; forgives sins or dies for them? If we are allowed to relabel scientific awe as a religious impulse, the case goes through on the nod. You have redefined science as religion, so it's hardly surprising if they turn out to 'converge'.
Another kind of convergence has been alleged between modern physics and eastern mysticism. The argument goes essentially as follows. Quantum mechanics, that brilliantly successful flagship theory of modern science, is deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Eastern mystics have always been deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Therefore eastern mystics must have been talking about quantum theory all along. Similar mileage is made of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle ('Aren't we all, in a very real sense, uncertain? '), Fuzzy Logic ('Yes, it's OK for you to be fuzzy too'), Chaos and Complexity Theory (the butterfly effect, the platonic, hidden beauty of the Mandelbrot Set - you name it, somebody has mysticized it and turned it into dollars). You can buy any number of books on 'quantum healing', not to mention quantum psychology, quantum responsibility, quantum morality, quantum aesthetics, quantum immortality and quantum theology. I haven't found a book on quantum feminism, quantum financial management or Afro-quantum theory, but give it time. The whole dippy business is ably exposed by the physicist Victor Stenger
structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. ' From Albert Einstein, The Human Side, ed. H. Dukas and B. Hoffman (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1981). The lie is still being systematically spread about, carried through the meme pool by the desperate desire so many people have to believe it - such is Einstein's prestige.
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in his book The Unconscious Quantum, from which the following gem is 88
taken. In a lecture on 'Afrocentric healing', the psychiatrist Patricia Newton said that traditional healers
. . . are able to tap that other realm of negative entropy - that superquantum velocity and frequency of electromagnetic energy and bring them as conduits down to our level. It's not magic. It's not mumbo-jumbo. You will see the dawn of the twenty-first century, the new medical quantum physics really distributing these energies and what they are doing.
Sorry, mumbo-jumbo is precisely what it is. Not African mumbo-jumbo but pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo, even down to the trademark misuse of 'energy'. It is also religion, masquerading as science in a cloying love-feast of bogus convergence.
In 1996 the Vatican, fresh from its magnanimous reconciliation with Galileo a mere 350 years after his death, publicly announced that evolution had been promoted from tentative hypothesis to accepted theory of science*. This is less dramatic than many American Protestants think it is, for the Roman Church, whatever its faults, has never been noted for biblical literalism - on the contrary, it has treated the Bible with suspicion, as something close to a subversive document, needing to be carefully filtered through priests rather than given raw to congregations. The Pope's recent message on evolution has, nevertheless, been hailed as another example of late twentieth-century convergence between science and religion. Responses to the Pope's message exhibited liberal intellec- tuals at their worst, falling over themselves in their agnostic eagerness to concede to religion its own 'magisterium't, of equal importance to
? This is to give the Pope the benefit of the doubt. The key passage in the original French version of his message is, 'Aujourd'hui. . . de nouvelles connaissances conduisent a reconnoitre dans la theorie de devolution plus qu'une hypothese. ' The official English translation rendered 'plus qu'une hypothese' as 'more than one hypothesis'. 'Une' is ambiguous in French, and it has been charitably suggested that what the Pope really meant was that evolution is 'more than a [mere] hypothesis'. If the official English version is indeed a mistranslation, it is at best a spectacularly incompetent piece of work. It was certainly a godsend to opponents of evolution within the Catholic Church. The Catholic World Report eagerly seized upon 'more than one hypothesis' to conclude that there was a Tack of unanimity within the scientific community itself. The official Vatican line now favours the 'more than a mere hypothesis' interpretation, and this is fortunately how the news media have taken it. On the other hand,
a later passage in the Pope's message seems consonant with the possibility that the official English translation got it right after all: 'And, to tell the truth, rather than the theory of evolution, we should speak of several theories of evolution. ' Perhaps the Pope is simply confused, and doesn't know what he means.
tThe word appears in a section heading, 'Evolution and the Church's Magisterium', in the official English version of the Pope's message, but not in the original French version, which has no section headings. Responses to the Pope's message, and the text of the message itself, including one by me, were published in the Quarterly Review of Biology, 72 (1992), 4.
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? that of science, but not opposed to it, not even overlapping it. Such agnostic conciliation is, once again, easy to mistake for genuine convergence, a true meeting of minds.
At its most naive, this intellectual appeasement policy partitions up the intellectual territory into 'how questions' (science) and 'why questions' (religion). What are 'why questions', and why should we feel entitled to think they deserve an answer? There may be some deep questions about the cosmos that are forever beyond science. The mistake is to think that they are therefore not beyond religion too. I once asked a distinguished astronomer, a fellow of my college, to explain the Big Bang to me. He did so to the best of his (and my) ability, and I then asked what it was about the fundamental laws of physics that made the spontaneous origin of space and time possible. 'Ah,' he smiled, 'Now we move beyond the realm of science. This is where I have to hand over to our good friend the Chaplain. ' But why the Chaplain? Why not the gardener or the chef? Of course chaplains, unlike chefs and gardeners, claim to have some insight into ultimate questions. But what reason have we ever been given for taking their claim seriously? Once again, I suspect that my friend the Professor of Astronomy was using the Einstein/Hawking trick of letting 'God' stand for 'That which we don't understand'. It would be a harmless trick if it were not con- tinually misunderstood by those hungry to misunderstand it. In any case, optimists among scientists, of whom I am one, will insist that 'That which we don't understand' means only 'That which we don't yet understand'. Science is still working on the problem. We don't know where, or even whether, we shall ultimately be brought up short.
Agnostic conciliation, the decent liberal bending over backwards to concede as much as possible to anybody who shouts loudly enough, reaches ludicrous lengths in the following common piece of sloppy thinking. It goes roughly like this. You can't prove a negative (so far so good). Science has no way to disprove the existence of a supreme being (this is strictly true). Therefore belief (or disbelief) in a supreme being is a matter of pure individual inclination, and they are therefore both equally deserving of respectful attention! When you say it like that the fallacy is almost self-evident: we hardly need spell out the reductio ad absurdum. To borrow a point from Bertrand Russell, we must be equally agnostic about the theory that there is a china teapot in elliptical orbit around the Sun. We can't disprove it. But that doesn't mean the theory that there is a teapot is on level terms with the theory that there isn't.
Now, if it be retorted that there actually are reasons X, Y and Z for finding a supreme being more plausible than a celestial teapot, then X,
THE GREAT CONVERGENCE
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? THE INFECTED MIND
Y and Z should be spelled out because, if legitimate, they are proper scientific arguments which should be evaluated on their merits. Don't protect them from scrutiny behind a screen of agnostic tolerance. If religious arguments are actually better than Russell's teapot, let us hear the case. Otherwise, let those who call themselves agnostic with respect to religion add that they are equally agnostic about orbiting teapots. At the same time, modern theists might acknowledge that, when it comes to Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Ammon Ra, they are actually atheists. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
In any case, the belief that religion and science occupy separate
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magisteria is dishonest. It founders on the undeniable fact that
religions still make claims about the world which, on analysis, turn out to be scientific claims. Moreover, religious apologists try to have it both ways, to eat their cake and have it. When talking to intellectuals, they carefully keep off science's turf, safe inside the separate and invulner- able religious magisterium. But when talking to a non-intellectual mass audience they make wanton use of miracle stories, which are blatant intrusions into scientific territory. The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Raising of Lazarus, the manifestations of Mary and the Saints around the Catholic world, even the Old Testament miracles, all are freely used for religious propaganda, and very effective they are with an audience of unsophisticates and children. Every one of these miracles amounts to a scientific claim, a violation of the normal running of the natural world. Theologians, if they want to remain honest, should make a choice. You can claim your own magisterium, separate from science's but still deserving of respect. But in that case you have to renounce miracles. Or you can keep your Lourdes and your miracles, and enjoy their huge recruiting potential among the uneducated. But then you must kiss goodbye to separate magisteria and your high-minded aspiration to converge on science.
The desire to have it both ways is not surprising in a good propagan- dist. What is surprising is the readiness of liberal agnostics to go along with it; and their readiness to write off, as simplistic, insensitive extremists, those of us with the temerity to blow the whistle. The whistle-blowers are accused of flogging a dead horse, of imagining an outdated caricature of religion in which God has a long white beard and lives in a physical place called Heaven. Nowadays, we are told, religion has moved on. Heaven is not a physical place, and God does not have a physical body where a beard might sit. Well, yes, admirable: separate
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? magisteria, real convergence. But the doctrine of the Assumption was defined as an Article of Faith by Pope Pius XII as recently as 1 November 1950, and is binding on all Catholics. It clearly states that the body of Mary was taken into Heaven and reunited with her soul. What can that mean, if not that Heaven is a physical place, physical enough to contain bodies? To repeat, this is not some quaint and obsolete tradition, with nowadays a purely symbolic significance.